War Effort Takes Wing

July 15, 2002|By Diane C. Lade Staff writer

American aviation was in its sprawling adolescence, and so were they when they took to the skies.

Ruth Fleisher and S. Buddy Harris, who today are South Florida retirees, were teenagers when they became licensed pilots. And when war came along shortly afterward, it was almost too good to be true. How better to prove themselves and follow in the footsteps of their idols, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh?

There were, however, two little problems.

For one, Harris was 17 when America entered World War II in 1942, a year too young to become an Army Air Force pilot.

And Fleisher was female. Girls didn't have the right stuff to fly planes, the military insisted -- even if they were girls like Fleisher, who literally had grown up in the Rochester, N.Y., airport, where her pioneering pilot father had become the manager, and already was a licensed flight instructor.

But they ended up serving their country from the cockpit through two programs that often get overlooked in our ongoing romance with what has been called the Last Just War. They flew in civilian air corps.

"The activities of war got all the glory. But these pilots provided a necessary service by doing things that the military didn't have the time and the pilots to do," said Dorothy Cochrane, a general aviation curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Fleisher became a WASP, or Woman Airforce Service Pilot, one of 1,074 selected from 25,000 who applied. They ferried military planes from American base to base, were flight instructors, and tested new or repaired aircraft before they were sent into combat.

"We knew we had to be good, and we had to be careful," said Fleisher, 80, a widow who lives alone on her Homestead avocado farm in a sprawling house filled with mementos of a life in the air. "Otherwise, the headline would read: `Girl pilot crashes.'"

As for Harris, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, or CAP, flying surveillance missions to locate German submarines off the New York coast for a year while he waited to come of age.

Technically, he and some other teen pilots were considered military recruits and lived in barracks under the thumb of the Army Air Force, which tapped them the minute they turned 18.

But Harris and the others flew civilian airplanes -- little Piper Cubs and Stinsons repainted bright, easy-to-see yellow. When the Army decided to equip each plane with a single bomb, so the pilots could harass a sub if they found one, the explosive was strapped to the aircraft with a wire that also acted as the launching mechanism when the pilots yanked on a loose end.

More than 100,000 men and women signed up for CAP air and ground duty during World War II. Sub-chasers like Harris were credited with finding 173 Nazi submarines prowling off America's coast, dropping bombs on 57 of them and sinking two. They also guided military rescue units to torpedoed merchant ships so they could pick up survivors -- or bodies -- from the flaming water.

"From the time I got out of diapers, all I wanted to do was fly," said Harris, 75, who lives in the Edgewater Pointe Estates retirement community in Boca Raton. Although he spent his career as an urban planner and rarely flew after his Army discharge in 1946, he became recertified as a pilot at 58.

Now Harris is with CAP again, one of 4,000 Florida civilians dispatched by the Air Force on local search-and-rescue missions, doing a total of 424 statewide last year. A CAP lieutenant colonel, he was recently promoted to incident commander, which means he spends more time coordinating missions than flying.

But at least once a month, he hops into one of the planes kept on call at local airports and flies to Tampa for the Air Patrol's monthly statewide meeting. In March, he and six other silver-haired sub-chasers who still fly were honored at the Air and Space Museum.

Like Harris, Fleisher retains her credentials. Unlike commercial passenger airline pilots, light plane pilots can remain licensed at any age as long as they pass tests and have an annual physical by a Federal Aviation Administration-approved doctor.

But Fleisher rarely flies anymore, although she stays active in the tight sisterhood that binds the 500 WASPs still living.

Adversity cemented their friendships. When the military agreed to start using female aviators in 1941, "most people didn't think women should fly," said Fleisher, who was based at an Alabama military air field and tested planes just out of the repair shop.

The WASPs did dangerous work, and 38 died in crashes and accidents. But because the government hadn't granted them military status, even though they were flying military planes, the women had no benefits.

WASP Director Jackie Cochran, a famous prewar female flier from the Florida Panhandle, paid out of her own pocket to ship some of the girls' bodies back home, Fleisher said.

The WASPs were disbanded equally unceremoniously. By 1944, there finally were enough male pilots, and the women were told they weren't needed any more.